This section describes approaches that could be employed, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or employed. Hence, unless explicitly specified otherwise, any approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application, and any approaches described in this section are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Wide area networks are composed of edge routers that provide connections for a multi-homed network to a destination network via a core network, also referred to as a backbone network. Since the core network must be composed of core routers that must be able to perform the fastest possible switching operations for extremely large amounts of data traffic, the core routers often are implemented using BGP-free core routers: unlike edge routers that utilize BGP for tunneling data traffic across a core network to destination networks, BGP-free core routers do not employ BGP protocol and therefore do not need to learn about the millions of Internet protocol (IP) address prefixes that may be utilized by the edge routers.